via Frank: Elegance, Lightness, and Nothing

Elegance, Lightness, and Nothing

There’s an old story that people like telling, untrue as it may be, about writing implements in space. The American space program discovered that normal ink pens didn’t work on missions (no gravity in orbit to pull down the ink), so they spent millions to research and develop a pen that could write upside down. The Russians, the story goes, brought a pack of pencils.

Now, I suppose one could think that this story is about the Americans’ rigidity in thought, the bureaucratic waste in creating an object with limited utility, or even the enthusiasm with which the space program took up a new frontier of upside-down pens. But I like to think that the story is about the elegance of thought in the Russians’ solution. It was a simple swap, an obvious fix that must have been face-palmingly infuriating and suddenly obvious to the American scientists, a bit like the first time someone told me that I could keep those automatic toilets at the airport from flushing on me by putting some toilet paper over the sensor.

We as designers strive for our solutions to be elegant, so what’s interesting about this story is how it seems to suggest that the most elegant solution, in certain situations, might not be creating anything new at all. Lightness is to be found in substitution or recomposing, not in rote addition.

But, hammer sees nail, and all that. The new and novel has an appeal to it that hypnotizes even those who are the most steeped in the design process. A particularly interesting example occurred a few weeks ago at a design conference where I was speaking. Talk about ergonomics, health, and the benefits of standing over sitting for eight hours a day came up over coffee. Many had said they were researching or had bought standing-height desks with small motors that could have their height adjusted to sitting level for the times they wanted to sit for a bit. And I just looked down into my coffee, and thought about saying, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just buy a bar-height table and a stool?” But I decided it’d be better to just say nothing.

Thanks Frank Chimero

6 months agoNovember 6, 2011 Reblog